Every day the Israeli Defense Forces find more proof of the perfidy of the UN and UNRWA. Did you guess that the UN’s demand for a quick ceasefire was intended to conceal this? If so, you guessed right. This week, among other things, the IDF discovered Hamas Intelligence Headquarters and an enormous tunnel beneath UNRWA HQ in Gaza equipped with a huge server and data farm which was receiving its electricity from UNRWA sources. I’d hate to prejudge the honesty of the UNRWA officials who claim they’d no idea what was going on under their feet -- I mean, they might have thought there were giant hordes of very big moles under their HQ. Still, their denials strain credulity. Indeed, tunnels and tunnel entrances and weaponry and sometimes even terrorists have been found in every UNRWA facility in Gaza. Hamas (and certainly UNRWA) believed that these were the safest places to plot, hide themselves, store their weapons and surveillance equipment, and then bleat that they were immune from attack by the Hamas victims.
And then there are those who wanted us to believe that the stumbling, incoherent president was sharp as a tack despite two life-threatening brain aneurisms and advanced age. This week, the special counsel revealed your skepticism about Biden’s mental capacity was not misplaced. Special Counsel Robert Hur’s report released by Attorney General Merrick Garland reveals your concern was well-warranted. He found that Biden had removed classified information, mishandled it, disclosed it to someone not authorized to see it, and left it unsecured in “the garage, offices, and basement den in Mr. Biden’s Wilmington, Delaware, home.”
He found evidence that President Joe Biden “willfully” retained and shared highly classified materials when he was a private citizen, including documents about military and foreign policy in Afghanistan. The report nevertheless concluded that criminal charges were not warranted.
Similar charges were leveled by another special counsel against former president Trump, who asserts that he, with full authority to do so, had declassified them, kept them in secure storage with Secret Service personnel on the premises. No action will be had against Biden -- who, when he removed them, had no authority to declassify anything and broke every law involving classified material. Among the reasons for not prosecuting Biden is this:
“We have also considered that, at trial, Mr. Biden would likely present himself to a jury, as he did during our interview of him, as a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory,” the report states. “Based on our direct interactions with and observations of him, he is someone for whom many jurors will want to identify reasonable doubt.”
“It would be difficult to convince a jury that they should convict him -- by then a former president well into his eighties -- of a serious felony that requires a mental state of willfulness.”
Numerous Democrats have rushed to his defense, indicating that Biden is not in the least bit mentally impaired. The question then becomes, if that’s the case, should the prosecution begin? Alternatively, if he is too mentally impaired to be prosecuted, should he remain commander in chief? It seems hard to avoid these responses, but the Democrats are trying.
The first attack is, naturally, on Hur’s integrity. Those of with memories longer than a week or so recall with amusement Nancy Pelosi’s response to those who questioned Special Counsel Robert Mueller. She indicated that any questioning of him was shameless and undermined both the judicial system and the constitutional checks and balances provisions.
Unlike regular prosecutors, special counsels and independent counsels before them are obligated to write reports justifying their decisions on whether or not to prosecute. You may recall what happened with Hillary Clinton during the Ken Starr investigation. His predecessor Robert Ray indicated he would not seek criminal charges against her even though, contrary to her statements under oath, she had “ultimately influenced” the removal of the travel office personnel. However, “the evidence was insufficient to prove to a jury [in the District of Columbia] beyond a reasonable doubt that any of Mrs. Clinton’s statements and testimony regarding her involvement in the travel office firings were knowingly false.”
Since prosecutors have ethical restraints against bringing cases they know have no reasonable likelihood of producing a guilty verdict, Democratic officeholders basically have a get out of prosecution ticket in a venue -- the District of Columbia -- which no prosecutor believes would convict them.
Yet another response is the usual for when a Democrat is caught in wrongdoing: make the story a Republicans "pounce" narrative, underplaying what they are "pouncing" about. Naturally, the New Republic is in this camp. From their point of view, the coverage of this devastating report is already "overblown" by a Republican-dominated press. (Yes, they actually printed this.)
More honest publications concede this is devastating for Democrats.
Whatever language you use, I have not had a single person say, “Well, this really worked out well,” James Carville told this column, “Obviously this has been a bad 48 hours here.” Carville, best known for his central role in former President Clinton’s 1992 election campaign, added that Democrats were now looking to interventions from the Supreme Court, or a criminal conviction for Trump, in the hope that such developments would shift the election in Biden’s favor. “We’re officially in Hail Mary mode here,” he said. A different Democratic strategist, who asked for anonymity, chose a similarly dire metaphor. “We’re at a DEFCON One situation,” the strategist said. “I think between the special counsel report and the more catastrophic press conference that followed, and the even more catastrophic attacking of the special counsel for the report, they are magnifying and dismissing the concerns that the overwhelming majority of Americans have about Biden -- including a lot of Democrats,” Meanwhile, in a CNN appearance Friday, Paul Begala -- who rose to political fame along with Carville during the 1992 Clinton campaign -- described himself as a “Biden supporter”, but continued, “I slept like a baby. I woke up every two hours and wet the bed. This is terrible for Democrats and anybody with a functioning brain knows that.”
It’s too late for many states to add new names to their primary elections. If it’s too late to add a substitute for Biden to the primaries in those states, they’ll have to rely on write-in campaigns. The party apparently lacks a backup plan if it decides to run with a different candidate.
With less than a year until election day, the Democratic Party has no apparent backup plan if it decides to part with its endorsed candidate.
Choosing a candidate to run against or replace Biden would also likely be a tremendously messy process: Would the party want to go with its current vice president, Kamala Harris, California Gov. Gavin Newsom, Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, or some other dark horse candidate? Who within the party would ultimately make that decision? What happens to all of the Biden campaign's funding? [snip] If a replacement for Biden can't be formally placed on ballots, the only option for the Democratic Party, if it's serious about fielding a different nominee, would be to quickly mobilize a campaign to write that candidate's name on state Democratic primary ballots. But if this write-in campaign isn't implemented before Super Tuesday, there's little chance at all that a formal replacement for Biden will be available on Democratic tickets come November.
The deadline to appear as an independent candidate on general election ballots in November is much more lenient, meaning the Democratic Party could, as a last resort, opt to promote a candidate not even tied to the party on the ballot.
With all this in mind, it's almost certainly in the Democratic Party's best interest to coalesce around Biden as much as possible to build support around his campaign.
Will they go down with the ship? Gin up protests and riots as they’ve done before? Continuing rigging elections, this time with millions of illegal immigrants, illegally voting?
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